I’ve been running Linux on my main computer for the past three or four years now. I’ve also had a great set of Bose headphones for most of that time, but have never been able to get them to pair via bluetooth to the Linux machine. Recently, however, I ran into the following article that changed everything: Installing Bose QuietComfort 35 on Linux Mint 18. I’ve tried similar approaches, but nothing that ever worked… until now! I’m running Ubuntu 16.04 (although I’ve been thinking of switching to Mint for a while now — it’s just so much damn work to switch). In any case, this should work for most flavors of Linux.

First, create a new file: /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf with the following contents:

# AutoEnable defines option to enable all controllers when they are found.
# This includes adapters present on start as well as adapters that are plugged
# in later on. Defaults to 'false'.
AutoEnable=true